The photo in the Tribune doesn’t do Laura Condon justice. Laura was no nonsense when I worked with her but she didn’t glower.
She was rarely on my side when our terms over lapped by six years but she helped elect me to four contentious months as the School Board chairman.
I met Laura in my disastrous second year as a teacher in the Proctor schools. We both taught across from the high school in the Summit Elementary school where the last of the baby boom era kids were being shuttled. Proctor resisted a tax hike to properly house its middle school students. Laura struck me as a sweet and timid person in our few get togethers in the Summit School faculty lounge. In later years she was elected the Proctor teacher’s union president. Proctor administrators considered her many things but not timid.
I asked her to meet with me for coffee after doing my best to make sure she wasn’t elected to the Duluth School Board in 1997. I knw I could count on her to try to tank the charter school I had helped establish but I offered to be a bridge between her anti-charter four person minority and my pro-Edison’s slim five person majority. I would never really pull that off and stepped down as chairman in a voodoo storm that April. The one thing I remember her telling me was that she didn’t trust any administrator. I always remembered that she she got the person she wanted to be Duluth’s new Superintendent a year later.
Counting this post Laura made it to 34 Lincolndemocrat posts. I disagreed with Laura often. She was a little ornery but I never doubted that she had the best interest of kids at heart. I might have made some pointed comments about Laura’s stands but I doubt that I ever hit under the belt.
As is often said at the passing of a noteworthy person, Rest in Peace Laura.
